 | | If we except her haunting the old church, not a single christian feature is introduced. The whole matter is one tissue of fantastic sentiment, as though the growth of flowers by one's grave, and the fresh country air passing over it, and the games of children near it, could abate by one particle the venom of death's sting. To work up an elaborate picture of dying and death, without the only ingredient that can make the undisguised reality other than "an uncouth hideous thing"; to omit all reference to that by means of which alone the one enemy has "grown fair and full of grace, much in request, much sought for as a good"; this is not dealing fairly by us.
53
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This critic is trying hard to be fair. He assures us anxiously that he is "far indeed from demanding the direct introduction of religion in a novel," but insists that once the author has raised our expectations, once he has forced us to think about death and what it means, there can be only one way of dealing with it. Dickens might have protested that his intentions
were
Christian; but the softened, emotive religiosity that he offers does not, for this critic, count as Christianity. For him, an example of a Christian writer is not Dickens but George Herbert, someone whose poems are built firmly on doctrine.
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That is obviously not the objection of Huxley, or of Leavis, or of Careyor is it? It may not be as wholly unrelated to theirs as at first appears, for what this critic dislikes is a kind of self-indulgence, a pleasure which the author takes in contemplating his own sweetening of death. We do not need to accept Christian doctrine to accept that death
is
a hideous uncouth thing, any more than we need accept it to value Herbert's poem. And looking at the rest of this critic's discussion of
The Old Curiosity Shop
, I find myself developing a respect for him. His remarks on Quilp are astonishingly shrewd: he obviously enjoyed the "jollifications with rum punch and such like" and declares that he is a man of genius and that Mrs. Quilp was in love with him. This is true, and almost Freudian; and at other moments he is Dostoyevskian too: "If a man be neither saintly nor sensual, we believe there is nothing left for him but to be satanic"this might be about Stavrogin! I am therefore willing to grant him the honor (if honor it is) of being a proto-modern; and I claim him confidently as evidence that not all Victorians were besotted by sentimentality.
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Then there is Fitzjames Stephen, whose cool detachment on child deaths has already been quoted and who wrote of Nell's death,
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